0

I guess they all can be broken back down into addition but I just have always had this burning question if there was some other mystery operator after exponentiation.

Chris W
  • 566

2 Answers2

2

Indeed. All of these come under the class of hyperoperators: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperoperation

So after Exponentiation, you have Tetration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration.

Example: enter image description here

Then pentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentation

For further study, you can read about this:

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_function
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation
  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinhaus%E2%80%93Moser_notation

Also, as suggested in the comments, you may want to take a look at this question, which is similar to yours... What comes after exponents?

1

There is the tower exponential $m^{m^{m \ldots}}$ where you do the tower $n$ times high in order to get the value for $m,n$. And if you want to keep going, at least for integers, you can look up the Ackerman function. That is sort of the well-known "ultimate" in defining a sequence of functions that all grow way faster than the previous one in the sequence, in a somewhat canonical fashion.

user2566092
  • 26,142